With Actifio, Wire Belt Eliminates Backup Software

WALTHAM, Mass. November 16, 2011 –(EON: Enhanced Online News)– Actifio™, the Protection and Availability Storage (PAS) platform company, today announced that the Wire Belt Company has completely replaced its traditional legacy backup software, eliminated backup and restore windows, and reduced bandwidth costs by 70 percent since deploying the PAS platform. Wire Belt, a manufacturer of conveyor systems and belts used in the poultry and snack foods industries, turned to Actifio to solve multiple challenges associated with its data protection and disaster recovery infrastructure.

With exponential growth in the size of sensitive intellectual property-related data, Wire Belt was struggling to ensure that data was protected and quickly recoverable to meet its business needs. The company was increasingly unable to meet backup windows using its backup software and hours of restore time resulted in unacceptable down time for the business. An attempt to provide quick data restores with array snapshots resulted in filling up the production storage device, prompting a need for additional budget to purchase new production storage systems. Previous disaster recovery practices of moving backup tapes to offsite storage were counter-productive since data was never recoverable in time to meet business needs and objectives. After an extensive analysis of available backup applications and deduplication devices, Wire Belt chose Actifio not only to address data protection and disaster recovery with its virtualized data management technology, but also to defer the purchase of a new production storage device and free up the capacity being used by snapshot data — all at a 75 percent lower cost.

“We had virtualized a great deal of our infrastructure, adding VMware machines and implementing virtual desktop infrastructure. However, our data management challenges were really holding us back from fully benefitting from the streamlined operations and cost savings made possible by a virtualized environment,” said Jason Axne, systems administrator, Wire Belt. “With its tremendous flexibility and incredibly intuitive user interface, the Actifio PAS platform gets our vote as the best data management solution for virtual and physical server environments. We were able to deploy the Actifio platform within hours, with time and cost savings immediately apparent. Actifio really delivered the best of all worlds.”

Today, Wire Belt is able to increase business availability by backing up its servers six times a day—with no backup windows—and restore an entire server in minutes, even from an outside disaster recovery site. The manufacturer replicates data to a remote co-location site daily for improved business continuity and has recognized significant WAN bandwidth savings from using Actifio’s unique universal deduplication capabilities. Using the integrated snapshot capabilities of Actifio PAS, Wire Belt was able to defer the investment of a new production storage device by freeing more than 30 percent of production storage capacity used for snapshot data and storing that data on a lower cost storage device.

“Backup software as we know it is dead. Obsolete,” said Ash Ashutosh, founder and CEO of Actifio. “With organizations virtualizing servers in the data center, it is time to revisit the arcane practices of backup, disaster recovery and business continuity. By getting rid of the complex, expensive and inflexible collection of multiple point tools, users like Wire Belt are rapidly embracing Actifio PAS to achieve the benefits of virtualization – enhanced business availability, vendor independence and improved utilization, all at a significantly lower cost.”

The Actifio PAS platform is optimized for managing copies of production data, eliminating redundant silos of infrastructure and data management applications. By virtualizing the management and retention of data, Actifio transforms the need for multiple data silos and point tools deployed for backup, disaster recovery, business continuity, compliance, analytics, and test and development— into one, SLA-driven, virtualized Protection and Availability storage device.

About Actifio
Actifio™, the Protection and Availability Storage (PAS) platform company, pioneered the industry’s first storage system optimized for managing copies of production data, eliminating redundant silos of IT infrastructure and data management applications. By introducing virtualization into data management, Actifio delivers an application-centric, SLA-driven solution that decouples the management of data from storage, network and server infrastructure and reduces costs by 10X. Actifio has helped liberate IT organizations and services providers of all sizes from vendor lock-in and the management challenges associated with exploding data growth. Actifio is headquartered in Waltham, Mass. with offices around the world. For more information, please visit: http://www.actifio.com.